Before Becoming Sexworkers

Abstract

This chapter introduces the ‘pre-sexworker’ phase of my respondents’ experiences against the backdrop of relevant socio-economic conditions in Thailand. The research perspectives alternate between the respondents’ personal experiences within intimate and associational relationships and the macro-structural conditions of particular times and places. This way of looking at the phenomena of the global sex trade is used in the later chapters as well, but it is used here to emphasise respondents’ everyday relationships with husbands and lovers, mothers and fathers, children, brothers and sisters, relatives and neighbours which carry the heavy weight of duty and obligation, sufficiency and fulfilment in emotional as well as economic terms. All of these factors shaped young women’s decisions to go into the sex industry, and sometimes as far away as Japan. Quite often incorporated into this web of relations are women’s own aspirations toward autonomy and freedom, for different lives in cities distant from poverty-stricken home communities. Such aspirations are driven by and drive in turn the modernisation of Thai society, a modernisation increasingly susceptible to the globalised culture and economy conveyed on a mass-scale by the actual flow of people, goods and information. At the same time, however, blatant violence and coercion are sometimes aspects of the intimate relationships especially of those women forced into the sex industry during childhood at least in part through family ties.